A Nationalist Metaphysics: State Fixations, National Maps, and the Geo-Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-82-1-33
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American history and culture
ResumoIn 1847 Mariano Otero, attempting to account for the ease with which “ten or twelve thousand men . . . penetrated from Veracruz to the very capital of the republic,” offered a stinging explanation: Mexico did not constitute, nor could it properly call itself, a nation.1 Locating the absence of nationhood in the persisting legacies of colonial rule, Otero questioned the degree to which Mexico had moved from colony to modern nation. Such an assertion must have proved disturbing to many, coming as it did a quarter-century after the proclamation of independence from Spanish rule. Certainly the Mexican elite that inherited the mantle of independence in 1821 imagined themselves to be members of a distinctly Mexican nation and state.2 Yet acts of imagination were not, in and of themselves, powerful enough to sustain Mexico, regardless of how hard or heartfelt “its” leaders imagined, as the turbulent years leading up to and including the Mexican-American War had amply demonstrated.3 In the wake of the war, the questions that had confronted the republic in 1821 persisted: How would an extensive and complex landscape and its inhabitants cohere as an intelligible, material unit? How would a new political territory be seen as externally and internally legitimate? And what would be the best way to demonstrate that a nation, a state, a government were something more than mere conjecture? These were, to borrow a term from philosophy, metaphysical questions and the methods devised to answer them were part of a broader nationalist metaphysics.4Routines of mapping and naming figured as fundamental components of this nationalist metaphysics and in the symbolic creation of the Mexican nation-state. To demonstrate that Mexico was indeed something more than a concept, to legitimate Mexico’s spatial and temporal existence, and to make visual arguments about its historical and geographical coherence, intellectuals from the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística [SMGE], with the backing of state officials, increasingly devoted their attention to the construction of general maps (cartas generales) of the republic. On the purportedly objective surfaces of national maps, they blended history and geography to connect a conceptual space to a narrated place, endowing Mexico with both a textual tangibility and a palpable past. Mexico thus materialized on the cartographer’s table, a plotted surface upon which the nation-state’s past and future could simultaneously unfold.The following essay is divided into four sections: the first explains why Mexican officials pursued the construction of a national map; the second section analyzes Antonio García Cubas’s 1857 carta general of Mexico to show how cartographic science visually naturalized the nation-state; the third section shows how artistic images that appeared on that same map served to connect the plotted territory to an ideologically saturated portrait of a supposedly quintessential Mexican landscape; and the final section focuses on the importance of place names on the map, specifically, how the arbitrary changing of place names by municipal authorities complicated metropolitan elites’ desires to spatially (and cartographically) ground a foundational narrative.“[A]ll nations have begun as we have, on the road of science,” averred Manuel Orozco y Berra in 1881.5 It is no surprise that such a statement—revealing as it does the very constructedness of the nation-state—would come from one of Mexico’s preeminent geographers. Geography proved a key science in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states, and had a close association with the technical, regulatory needs of those in power. The professionalization of geography and its incorporation as a discipline in the halls of higher learning as well as the founding of national geographic societies were direct consequences of rising military and economic nationalism.6 Mexico’s first geographic society—the Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística (later to become the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística)—had been created in 1833 by Valentín Gómez Farías, a president who believed that the accumulation and production of geographic and statistical knowledge of the nation’s territory were critical for national development.7 The growing concern with the importance of knowledge to governance ensured that, once established, the Instituto persisted in its activities relatively uninterrupted by the constant shifts in political power except for changes in its name.8 While statistical knowledge referred to the general collection of a wide array of numerical data on such things as agricultural production and population, the geographic focus was quite specific, namely, the creation of a general geographic map of the republic.Why the emphasis upon a national map? Certainly there were very practical concerns related to governance, particularly in the early years of the republic. For example, without a reliable national map the newly installed government could hardly begin to conceive of, let alone carry out, any political reorganization of the territory. This would prove to be a constant source of concern in the recurring territorial reconstructions of the country’s politico-territorial divisions by federalists and centralists, each of whom had their own politico-administrative geographies.9 A national map could also prove useful in the war against fiscal chaos, administrative fragmentation, and regional politics in that a variety of local and regional statistical information, as well as what were said to be quite precise state maps, could be compiled and incorporated into a master map.10 More importantly, perhaps, a national map of geographic and topographic accuracy could improve the fledgling state’s military capacity during a time of both international and domestic uncertainty, at least for the macrocoordination required for national defense. Thus in the 1820s the government created a new course of study in geographic engineering, commissioned individuals to “travel throughout the entire territory and assemble statistics and a geographic map,” and composed a national map from the remnants of the Spanish navy’s collection of images created for the defense of New Spain.11Such concerns provide an initial explanation for the persistent pursuance of a carta general but not a complete one, particularly as the years progressed. The fact remains that national maps are of such small scale that they often have minimal instrumental value. A military expedition sent to crush a rural rebellion or ward off a foreign invasion across the mesa central would find only so much of value in a map of the entire republic. The plotting of routes and planning of tactics required the large-scale topographic maps produced by military engineers based upon their traverse surveys through the countryside, not the small-scale political and geographic overviews of a carta general constructed from a compilation of sources. Similarly, development efforts, such as the building of roads that would tie regional economies and politics to a central apparatus, required primarily regional and local maps of various kinds.Yet federally subsidized agencies such as the Comisión Militar Estadística, successor of the Instituto Nacional de Geografía and immediate predecessor of the SMGE, still devoted the vast majority of their energies to creating a carta general, one which would be a “faithful expression of the land it represents.”12 Why? A national map had as much iconographic as it did instrumental power. It served the very basic function of defining a bounded space within which a newly emergent postimperial elite could purport to assert their power, confirm their continuing status, and legitimate their rights to rule and, in effect, represent.13 Moreover, a national map offered a symbolic affirmation of the political reality of an entity whose very existence was at the time increasingly called into question: a unified and sovereign Mexican nation-state. Rebellions in northern territories, the secession of Texas and the Yucatán, and regional conflicts all confounded any comforting thoughts of a unified national space and repeatedly raised the specter of total national disintegration. A national map refuted such troublesome realities by visually affirming what supposedly already existed: after all, if a map were simply a mimetic reflection of an objective reality, then a national map by definition presupposed the existence of the nation itself.14 The still-precarious and open-ended process of forging an independent Mexico appeared as authoritatively over, concluded, and confirmed. A scale-map of a nation-state, which furthered the ideological mirage of neutrality by applying presumably objective mathematical principles to map construction, thus argued backwards from the desired conclusion, serving as a model for, rather than of, what it purportedly represented.15Even simply delineating where Mexico ended and other nations presumably began could be significant at a time when established boundaries and territorial cohesion were increasingly regarded as integral features of the modern nation-state.16 Indeed, the powerful sway of territoriality as the basis for modern identity and control ensured that geographic science and its primary medium, the map, would occupy a place of preeminence in the nationalist repertoire. This was particularly the case by the 1840s. The increasingly strident predations of Mexico’s northern neighbor, with its fervent faith in Manifest Destiny, left little room or time for what one author has aptly termed “growing pains.”17 In a manner befitting their continentalist convictions, and further evidence of the power of the geographic imagination at the time, U.S. officials relied upon a kind of cartographic determinism to justify their imperial pretensions.18 Already in 1823 John Quincy Adams had equated geographical proximity with historical destiny when he promulgated his so-called ripe apple policy that argued that Cuba and Puerto Rico were “natural appendages to the North American continent,” fated to fall under U.S. control once the proper conditions prevailed.19 Soon after, in 1825, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Clay took such geographic determinism to an audacious extreme by suggesting to Mexican officials that turning over the northern reaches of Mexico would actually benefit the country by geographically centralizing its capital.20 By 1844 businessman and Democrat John O’Sullivan could comfortably assert that anyone “who cast a glance over the map of North America” could see that Texas was “a huge fragment, artificially broken off” from the continent to which it naturally belonged.21 He had little cause for concern: the presumably natural and national soon united.The importance of the carta general took on dramatic significance with the Mexican-American War. While countries such as the United States, England, Spain, and France achieved a degree of self-definition through imperial expansion, Mexico’s imperative need to construct and present itself as a sovereign, independent nation-state arose in the face of invasion and perceived impotence.22 Antonio García Cubas put it dramatically in his summation of the armistice of 1847:The members of the SMGE hinted at the continuing threat in the months following the armistice when they rhetorically asked, “how can one expect to understand the nation’s territorial extension, or consult regarding its defense, without the formation of a general map and one of each state and territory?”24Under these less than auspicious circumstances the SMGE’s new carta general appeared in 1850, hastily finished in the aftermath of the war and during the initial phases of the boundary demarcation. It contained a wealth of statistical information: comparative tables of principle mountain chains, including a Humboldtian comparison between those of Mexico and the major mountains of Europe; computation of the size of the republic in square leagues according to total territory; physical configuration insets; and charts of the major rivers. It also included a visual elaboration of the amount of territory lost in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the demarcation of the new international limits between Mexico and the United States. Reflective of the increasing primacy of the visual in the nineteenth century, the image purportedly brought an expression of bitterness from General Antonio López de Santa Anna who, for the first time, could actually envision the magnitude of territory Mexico had lost.25 The map was never published, partly because of a financial shortfall, and in 1851 a foreign traveler, Brantz Mayer, warned others that “there is no complete map of the territory which may be confidently relied upon.”26The need for a published and circulated Mexican-produced national map became even more pronounced when, in 1854, Mexico lost another portion of its territorial claims as a partial result of a faulty U.S. map. Article 5 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo dictated that John Disturnell’s 1846 Mapa de los Estados-Unidos de Méjico be used in the setting of the boundary line between the two nations. However, perceived defects in the map—particularly with regards to the location of El Paso and the course of the Río Grande—helped justify renewed U.S. territorial claims, culminating in the 1853–54 Gadsden Purchase.27 Regardless of the role Santa Anna and others played in the politics of the Purchase, Mexican intellectuals were convinced that Mexico needed an accurate, reliable, and internationally accepted and published national map of its own.But was it enough to merely delineate the nation’s territorial extent? Otero, in 1847, observed that it was “useless to point out that the Mexican republic possesses an immense territory of more than [840,000 square miles]” when Mexico itself lacked a “national spirit.”28 After the war, a new carta general, constructed by Antonio García Cubas in 1856, would both proffer an iconographic image of the state’s new parameters and fill that territory with the ghosts of the past, creating an image of a single national spirit.Shortly after the Mexican-American War, Antonio García Cubas (1832–1912) made a name for himself as one of Mexico’s leading geographers and cartographers. He began his career in the offices of the Secretaría de Colonización y Industria, simultaneously studying engineering at the Colegio de Minería. Due to the financial straits of his widowed mother, he took longer than usual to finish his degree, eventually graduating in 1865. In the meantime, he worked diligently on various cartographic and geographic projects, spending his free afternoons and evenings in the library of the SMGE and in the private collections of a number of the Sociedad’s members.The corridors of the Sociedad and the pages of its bulletin exposed García Cubas to a generation of intellectuals—both conservative and liberal—who increasingly viewed practices such as ethnography, linguistics, statistics, economics, history, and geography as integral and scientific components to nation-state formation.29 Befriended by a number of the scientists and intellectuals who coalesced around that institution, such as the geographer Manuel Orozco y Berra and historian José Fernando Ramírez, García Cubas flourished and was inducted in 1856, at the precocious age of 24, as an honorary member of the Sociedad. Before the end of the decade, García Cubas would be widely considered one of Mexico’s premier cartographers and geographers, on a par with his elderly mentor Orozco y Berra. In the coming years, his pictorial-descriptive maps and atlases would constitute the most important and well-known images of the Mexican nation-state produced prior to the publication of the maps of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They hung in the halls of power in Mexico City and on the walls of classrooms; they graced the pages of national histories, such as the multivolume México a través de los siglos (1887–89), and were exported to foreign countries where they were highly regarded as authoritative sources for publishers of guidebooks.30 In addition to producing national maps and atlases, he wrote numerous “booster” works, designed to promote Mexico abroad as a place for both physical and economic colonization, and a series of geography texts for Mexican schools.31The work that catapulted García Cubas to fame within government circles and the Sociedad, and which led to his early admission into that institution, was his carta general of 1857. In July 1856, García Cubas showed a number of the members in the Sociedad a national map he had produced based upon his consultation of various maps and atlases.32 The members of the Sociedad were evidently extremely impressed and García Cubas published the carta general the following year to wide acclaim (see figure 1).This carta general became the most well-known national map of Mexico well into the next decade and served as the basis for Orozco y Berra’s own cartographic reorganization of the political landscape under the French in 1865. García Cubas also included it in his 1858 Atlas geográfico, estadístico e histórico de la República Mexicana, a work designed to aid the grand projects of an ascendant liberal regime: colonization, capitalist development, and the disentailment of church and Indian lands.33While designed to aid in a variety of grand projects, García Cubas’s map was something of a grand project itself. García Cubas’s atlas, particularly the carta general, is an exemplary representation of a new nationalist sensibility arising from the Mexican-American War. Here, for the first time, a carta general purported to offer not only a vision of Mexico’s geography—of its territorial extent—but also of “its” history. On the surface of the map, history and geography came together to compose Mexico as a coherent historical and geographical entity; that is, as a legitimate nation-state. In one sense, the two disciplines came together in García Cubas’s own conception of history, which he understood as a geographically descriptive enterprise aimed at discerning how the country literally took shape. His maps and atlases were genealogies of the territory, narrating a kind of property-history in which the historical existence of the nation-state was taken as a given and a history of “its” territory was simply recounted. Hence his inclusion in the atlas of a lengthy political genealogy which traced contemporary Mexico’s politico-historical origins back to at least the seventh century and the kingdom of the Toltecs. And thus his devotion of generous space, in his Diccionario geográfico, histórico y biográfico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, to the Mexican-American War (which resulted in a massive territorial amputation) and his reduction of the French intervention (which did not) to a few scanty paragraphs.34 But history and geography came together in other ways on his carta general, in particular through a careful blend of scientific and artistic images.To understand how, I begin with García Cubas’s cartographic method. What did it mean to be a cartographer in Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century? Any image of a solo explorer slogging through the brush mopping sweat from his brow, waging warfare against teeming insects while straining under the weight of expensive instruments would be wide of the mark. García Cubas did very little fieldwork or surveying to construct his maps. Other than his historical map of the battle of Cinco de Mayo, for which he traveled to Puebla and toured the battlefield, all of his maps appear to have been constructed in his office in Mexico City.35 The opposition press of Mexico City seems to have picked up on this very point, ridiculing the distinguished ingeniero in rhyme: “Without making any stops / or even moving for a second / he knows the entire world / at least by a map.”36 They certainly understood the artificial conception of reality held by those who learned of the world from the comfort of metropolitan parlors.García Cubas might have been surprised by their scorn. On one level, it was simple: he was not a surveyor. To be a mapmaker in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico was to compile images and plot them onto a mathematically ordered surface: a task suited to an office rather than the field. Indeed, García Cubas frequently and proudly proclaimed that his maps were based not upon his own fieldwork but upon the “most recent and reliable information,” collected from state and municipal governments. The process entailed collecting the maps and then comparing them. It was a rational, rather than empirical, project based upon reason and deduction, not experience and exploration. Such a methodology reflected, in part, not only a lack of personnel and money to conduct large triangular surveys and regional chorographies, but also a faith in (and fascination with) encyclopedic forms of knowledge construction common at the time. When Orozco y Berra began his multivolume Diccionario universal de historia y geografía in 1853, he proudly wrote that his work was one of “compilation and not of creation.”37 The first carta general of 1850 included a statement of authenticity, attesting that in the formation of the map the cartographers had gathered close to 300 maps of the territory. García Cubas touted his own carta general as being nothing more than the product of careful comparative analysis of “the most exact maps” available at the time.Regardless of the quantity or quality of maps consulted, map compilation suffered from a particular and seemingly irresolvable tension: if the previous maps had been incorrect, inaccurate, and uncertain, what assurances did one have that the map they contributed to building would not suffer similar problems? There were none. A contemporary review by Orozco y Berra of García Cubas’s carta general observed that “the work is . . . of simple compilation; it is not perfect and still shows considerable errors.”38 However, he continued,As the author here suggests, García Cubas’s success came from his compilation of the “best existent maps” into a coordinated, coherent whole. An act of symbolic centralization, it garnered its status not as a result of a series of comprehensive and careful field surveys nor from necessarily correcting previous maps but from the unification of disparate regional maps into a single bound whole. The visual effect minimized variation and rupture, offering instead an apparent structural unity known as the nation-state. The success of the image, and its international legitimacy, derived also from the fact that García Cubas not only reunited a variety of available maps but also “coordinated” them, as Orozco y Berra’s felicitous word choice reveals. He literally coordinated the images by superimposing a graticule—the net of imaginary parallels and meridians thought to envelope the globe and which together provide geographic coordinates—onto his compiled material. Within this graticule, he positioned Mexico for the first time in relation to the Greenwich meridian rather than the easternmost point on the cathedral in the central plaza of Mexico City, the traditional meridian for Mexican maps.40 He thus brought Mexico into cartographic consonance with what were then construed to be the icons of advanced civilization, giving it a “modern” spatial sensibility.41But García Cubas’s use of the graticule surpassed the mere act of making sure his coordinates were internationally coordinated. While the graticule (as a concept put into practice) has a history, the graticule itself is strictly ahistorical in terms of what it delineates: it is simply, so the story goes, a reflection of a mathematically derived order, itself supposedly a mirror of the natural order of the universe more generally.42 In other words, it is something not so much created as discovered according to formal rules of mathematical logic. Mexico’s location within this timeless matrix made a similar subtle and transhistorical assertion: it was a nation discovered, not created. Structured by the graticule, the nation-state appeared as an objective reality, existing in advance of its own exploration. Its physical existence predicted by global coordinates, all that remained was to better render its dimensions and internal composition, a process guaranteed by a firm belief in scientific progress.43 In effect, García Cubas scientifically naturalized the Mexican nation-state through the visual medium of the map.A plotted, scientifically naturalized territory did not make Mexico. While the graticule predicted and structured a given space, it did not reveal a place.44 To make Mexico a tangible reality the scientifically derived surface needed to be attached to a visual panorama.45 Thus, adjoining the graticule, carefully placed so as not to obscure nor blend with the lined surface, lay artistic images that provided a visual, historical and spatial anchor to the plotted points of the abstract grid.46 These images visually complemented the coordinates that covered, and connected, a cartographic Mexico. They gave the scientific image an aesthetic and historical depth, infused a modern methodology with foundational mythology, and reconciled the pervasive nineteenth-century nationalist tension between modernity and authenticity.To the right of the cartouche García Cubas reproduced a number of popular images of archeological sites (see figure 2). He included here four images: labeled progressively from left to right are Palenque, Pirámide de Papantla, Mitla, and Uxmal. The images are indicative of an increasing reliance at mid-century upon the pre-Columbian past to improve Mexico’s national image. Certainly this was not the indigemanía of Porfirian Mexico, when state officials presented Aztec palaces at world’s fairs, unveiled statues of Aztec heroes such as Cuauhtémoc on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, and devoted an entire volume of México a través de los siglos, the ambitious synthesis of Mexico’s past, to the pre-Hispanic era.47 This kind of neo-Aztecan indigemanía was still inchoate in the 1850s and 1860s. It would be another three decades after the publication of García Cubas’s map before lands containing the very archeological monuments he painted were even exempted from alienation or sale and before an office for the Inspección y Conservación de Monumentos Arqueológicos de la República would be founded.48Yet neither was this the Mexico of the 1830s, characterized by a general “indifference to Mexico’s indigenous heritage,” in which the most conspicuous commentary on Indians in elite writings was their utter absence.49 Rather, in the middle decades of the century, intellectuals from the SMGE drew upon the perspectives of Clavijero and Teresa de Mier to appropriate a generalized indigenous past for historical precedent and priority. An editorial in the bulletin of the Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística observed as early as 1850 that not only did foreign writers provide an extraordinarily distorted view of Mexico by focusing only upon its recent history but they also virtually ignored the cultural achievements of contemporary Mexicans’ direct predecessors who were entitled “to be regarded as the most cultured people the Spaniards found in the New World.”50 Among other things, the editorial noted that the “ancient Mexicans” had “maps of the country and of the lands traversed by their forebears,” indicative of just how significant a place maps held in the pantheon of civilizational status.51 Orozco y Berra would pursue a similar line of argumentation in years to come, engaging in prodigious amounts of research to show that the Aztecs had geographic maps and plans as well as modern conceptions of property prior to the conquest.52The images in García Cubas’s cartouche belong to this tradition. While the Nahua would assume increasing prominence on the ancestral pedestal, a number of sedentary indigenous groups—Maya, Tarascans, Zapotecs—that had inhabited the terrain within contemporary Mexican national boundaries were included in the pantheon of Mexican patrimony. In sharp contrast, nonsedentary indigenous groups such as the Apache and Comanche, from their now predetermined peripheral realms, were deemed treacherous enemies of the state-in-formation. Both Orozco y Berra and García Cubas cast the Indians of the central plateau as sedentarists living the agrarian romance, defending civilization and progress from the incursions of “perfidious, traitorous and cruel” northern tribes.53 The nonsedentarists were “tribes” rather than “civilizations”: with no proper “ruins” or remnants to take one back in time and no rootedness to satisfy the nostalgia for origins, they were construed as having no history to speak of. A nationalist narration of the passage of time could only begin by envisioning a permanence in space. Connecting contemporary Mexico to a variety of sedentarist indigenous pasts portrayed it as a presumably unified territorial entity of historical longevity with a statist tradition, endowing the government’s own centralizing tendencies with historical pedigree. Images of disparate archaeological sites, such as the ones in the image here, thus wedded ideas of historical piety to geographical priority.54The images also elevated Mexico’s cultural capital in an increasingly exoticizing world while drawing attention away from the reality of the contemporary Indian, a problematic issue for both liberals and conservatives. Contemporary Indians conjured up images of caste wars and colonial legacies and were understood largely as a “problem” to which liberal and conservative alike offered varying solutions: the abolition of communal land tenure, their political incorporation as national citizens, or the encouragement of European immigration and the whiteni
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